For him in the lonely desert the best genius of Arabia has carefully recorded upon parchment its romantic visions, for him Haroun El Rashid lived his romantic life, for him the angel spoke to Mohammad in the cave, and God received the Prophet into the seventh heaven.
Some early morning a cry rings through the group of black square tents. He springs from his dreams of green gardens and flowing waters, and stands sternly against the hostile tribe which has surprised his own. The remorseless morning secretes in desert silence the clash of swords, the ring of musketry, the battle-cry. At sunset the black square tents are gone, the desolation of silence fills the air that was musical with the recited loves of Zul-Himmeh, and the light sand drifts in the evening wind over the corpse of a Bedoueen.
—So the grim Genius of the desert touches every stop of romance and of life in you as you traverse his realm and meditate his children. Yet warm and fascinating as is his breath, it does not warp your loyalty to your native West, and to the time in which you were born. Springing from your hard bed upon the desert, and with wild morning enthusiasm pushing aside the door of your tent, and stepping out to stand among the stars, you hail the desert and hate the city, and glancing toward the tent of the Armenian Khadra, you shout aloud to astonished MacWhirter,
"I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race."
But as the day draws forward, and you see the same forms and the same life that Abraham saw, and know that Joseph leading Mary into Egypt might pass you to-day, nor be aware of more than a single sunset since he passed before, then you feel that this germ, changeless at home, is only developed elsewhere—that the boundless desert freedom is only a resultless romance.
The sun sets and the camp is pitched. The shadows are grateful to your eye, as the dry air to your lungs. But as you sit quietly in the tent-door, watching the Armenian camp and the camels, your cheeks pales suddenly as you remember Abraham, and that "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day." Saving yourself, what of the scene is changed since then? The desert, the camels, the tents, the turbaned Arabs, they were what Abraham saw when "he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, lo! three men stood by him."
You are contemporary with the eldest history. Your companions are the dusky figures of vaguest tradition. The "long result of Time," is not for you. In that moment you have lost your birthright. You are Ishmael's brother. You have your morning's wish. A child of the desert, not for you are Art, and Poetry, and Science, and the glowing roll of History shrivels away.
The dream passes as the day dies, and to the same stars which heard your morning shout of desert praise, you whisper as you close the tent-door at evening,
"Better fifty years of Europe, than a cycle of Cathay."